1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to systems and methods for assisting a user in obtaining information from an information retrieval system. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems and methods for identifying and recommending queries related to trending topics based on a query received from a user of an information retrieval system.
2. Background
Generally speaking, an information retrieval system is an automated system that assists a user in searching for and obtaining access to information. A search engine is one type of information retrieval system. A search engine is designed to help users search for and obtain access to information that is stored in a computer system or across a network of computers. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information as well the amount of information that must be consulted. The most public, visible form of a search engine is a Web search engine which is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. Some well-known Web search engines include Yahoo!® Search (search.yahoo.com), provided by Yahoo! Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., Bing™ (www.bing.com), provided by Microsoft® Corporation of Redmond, Wash., and Google™ (www.google.com), provided by Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. Further types of search engines include personal search engines, mobile search engines, and enterprise search engines that search on intranets, among others.
To perform a search, a user of a search engine typically enters a query into a text entry box of the search engine. The query contains one or more words/terms, such as “hazardous waste” or “country music.” The terms of the query are typically selected by the user to find particular information of interest to the user. The search engine processes the query and returns a list of documents relevant to the query, often sorted in accordance with a relevancy metric. In a Web-based search, the search engine typically returns a list of uniform resource locator (URL) addresses for the relevant documents, which is displayed to the user in a search results page.
A user of a search engine may submit a query to obtain time-sensitive information about a particular topic (e.g., breaking news, current events, or the like). Such users may also be interested in obtaining information about topics related to the subject matter of their query that are currently becoming popular with others. Such topics may be referred to herein as “trending” topics. However, the search engine may not return information about such trending topics when returning search results based on the original query. As a result, the user may fail to retrieve the desired information. This may be frustrating to the user. Furthermore, if the search engine is a Web search engine, such failure to retrieve desired information on behalf of users can lead to a decline in key metrics associated with the search engine, such as page views, click-through rates, and the like.